The Elopement
With Gill Hornby’s The Elopement, readers may indulge in a third “Austen family” story. By nature, it embodies the fairy tale: part romance set in the idyllic countryside, part Cinderella story. However, the underlying theme is the threat to women from childbirth: stillbirths, miscarriages, mothers dying in labor.
There are two elopements, a very attractive (banished) governess, eleven Knight siblings (Austen’s nieces and nephews), vigorous brothers leaping about Kent disrupting the stasis of sisters at their needlework, and our long-suffering Miss Cassandra Austen, who appears briefly in her elderly ways (although still in her fifties). Only three years have passed since Jane Austen’s death at the opening of The Elopement, which introduces 28-year-old near-spinster Fanny Austen Knight in a comic mode, but shifts to Mary Dorothea, stepdaughter from Fanny’s sudden marriage.
While the two main characters share a close profile – loss of a dear mother at an early age and several younger siblings to worry over – they are presented as antagonists by virtue of circumstances: stepmother to stepdaughter. The tone is generally lighthearted and the language fanciful with extended repetitive passages. Mary begins to fall in love at a tender age (13) with her older stepbrother Ned Austen Knight. Here enter allusions to the love Fanny Price develops for cousin Edmund in Mansfield Park and the theme of marrying for love. Tied to the gravely serious Sir Edward Knatchbull, Fanny even begins to resemble dreadful Mrs. Norris in her neglect of Mary. Meanwhile Fanny’s dictatorial husband is matchmaking his daughter with his own half-brother.
Fanny Knight Knatchbull kept lifelong diaries, growing into the Victorian dowager critical of her Austen relations. Gill Hornby, in hyperbolic style contrasting with Austen’s rational style, has painted young, wedded Fanny as the conniver and Mary as the God-fearing stepdaughter who challenges with a scandalous elopement.
